Psychosocial Studies is a burgeoning, interdisciplinary area of research, teaching and professional practice, exploring the relation between individualised subjectivities and social and political formations. The field encompasses work from a wide range of academic disciplines including: anthropology, art and design, creative writing, cultural studies, economics, education, gender studies, history, legal studies, management, media studies, medical studies, politics, post colonial studies, psychology, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, social policy, social work and sociology.

The social world is saturated with powerful formations of knowledge that colonise individual and institutional identities. Some knowledge emerges as legitimised and authoritative; other knowledge is resisted or repressed. Psychosocial approaches highlight the unstable basis of knowledge, learning and research; of knowing and not knowing. How do we come to formulate knowledge in the ways that we do? Are there other possible ways of knowing that are too difficult or unsettling for us to begin to explore?

Do we need the authority of legitimised institutions and regularized methods to build secure knowledge? What might it mean to build insecure edifices of knowledge? How can/should we trouble notions of knowledge in processes of teaching, learning and research? How does knowledge circulate and how is it implicated in exclusionary social processes? The conference will generate discussions to help us to explore and develop psychosocial conceptualisations of knowing and not knowing, learning and resistance: the flows and blockages positioned within individuals and institutions, and within the discursive and material processes that constitute these social identities. We aim to encompass the various and contrasting ways these ideas are interpreted in psychosocial approaches to research and practice.

The organisers hope to create an innovative space for productive discussion and exploration of these ideas through a move away from conventional conference formats. Please download the full Knowing and Not Knowing Call for Papersfor more details, or contact the conference organisers Tamara Bibby and Claudia Lapping. Submissions are due by Monday 2 July.

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